Arcanum
by pandorad24
Summary: After discovering Blaine's relationship with Kurt, his parents send him to a gay-to-straight conversion camp, where Dave Karofsky has enrolled himself as an alternative to his suicide attempt. The camp's dark secrets are soon surfaced when a cabin counselor takes interest in Blaine. Karofsky can do nothing but watch his fairytale castles crumble. (Implied rape, Klaine.)


**Didn't plan on writing any more fanfiction, but my hand must have slipped. Whoops.  
**

* * *

"Straight camp," Kurt exclaimed as he entered the chorus room, dumping his self-designed bag onto the floor with unnecessary force, his face a mask of bitterness. "Blaine's parents just shipped him off, without any kind of warning. They didn't even let him say goodbye!" His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, as if he were debating whether or not to redecorate the wall with a sizable new dent in the sheetrock.

"Dude," Sam murmured sympathetically. "That's messed up."

"I had to hear the news from his mother's mouth," Kurt continued, folding his arms across his chest. "I went over to his house yesterday because we planned for me to help him rehearse his new solo. When she answered the door, she just told me to go away. 'He won't be needing you anymore,' she said. As if a couple weeks in the woods will magically turn him straight!"

"My dads have told me some… horrible things about those places," Rachel said softly, staring down at her lap. "Hiram said that they, like, pair up the gays and lesbians and make them watch porn and, you know, touch each other."

"Gee, thanks for those heartwarming words of comfort, Rachel," Kurt spat miserably.

"I'm sure Blaine will be fine," Mr. Shue offered consolingly. "He's dealt with prejudice like this before. You both have."

"At least I had the support of my dad and Carole. Blaine has Hitler and the Wicked Witch of the West."

An uncomfortable silence fell over the room, and Kurt took a seat, burying his head in his hands. After taking a couple moments for the awkwardness to settle in like a noxious gas, Mr. Shue cleared his throat and put on what he hoped to be an encouraging smile. "Alright, guys," he piped, tone saturated with overenthusiasm. "Who's up for an alt rock week?"

* * *

"Journey to Manhood" was the name they had bestowed upon a small collection of cabins nestled deep into a nondescript clearing of Ohio woodland, housing about forty "troubled" boys and staffed by sixteen of the most corrupt, manipulative men Blaine had ever encountered. Not five minutes after he had watched his mother's car peel off onto the dirt road without so much as an "I love you", he had been taken to the main lodge, forced to remove all clothing that his assigned counselor deemed effeminate, and toss them into the fireplace. He stood shivering and mortified in his undershirt and boxers, eyes trained on the bright yellow jeans and lilac sweater as they were gradually engulfed by flames.

This incident was only the first of countless.

"Repeat after me: My feelings are my choice. I have chosen wrong."

The words tasted bitter on his tongue. They fell from his lips like a curse, mingling with the robotic mantra of his cabin mates. The man at the podium had the posture of a drill sergeant and the stern glare of his father. Tacked to the wall just above his head was a glossy poster of a photogenic, smiling couple with their hands interlocked between them – a boy and a girl.

"I hereby pledge to dedicate my mind to making the right choice."

_I hereby pledge_…

Every morning began exactly in this way – this being his fourth. They filed into the lodge like cattle, made to utter the spiel until the camp director saw it fit to stop, rinsing and repeating the lies to the point that they began to sound like truths. Blaine glanced at the boys around him, a lump forming in his throat for each of the somber, empty faces. One by one, all the light had been sucked out of their eyes; their smiles were antique things only to be found in dust-tinted photographs.

For a place where love was so often discussed, there was surprisingly little to be had.

At 8:15, they were dismissed to the dining hall for breakfast. He made his way down the line with his tray, paying little attention to what they ladled onto his plate as he flit his gaze absentmindedly across the room, searching for the only familiar face he'd seen since his unwilling departure from Lima. Dave Karofsky met his eye, offering him an odd jerk of the lips that Blaine interpreted as a halfhearted attempt at a smile. The larger boy quickly turned back to his food.

Never one to be easily deterred, Blaine made a beeline for Karofsky's table and pointedly set his tray down at the place across from him, managing to forge his usual charming smile as he nonchalantly took a seat. "Hey," he tried.

The boy was staring at him, an indecipherable number of emotions playing across his face at once. He seemed to be debating his next move. "Hey," he returned flatly.

"Your parents send you here too?"

Karofsky appeared taken aback by the question, using the time to take a deliberate spoonful of cereal before responding. "No," he decided on. "I sent myself."

It wasn't the answer Blaine was expecting. He quirked an eyebrow, and with an incredulous tone inquired, "Why? This place is…" He trailed off, unable to supply just the right word.

"I know. I'm just…" Silence. After a few moments, Blaine wasn't sure if he would continue, but he finally muttered, "I'm not like you and Kurt. I'm not proud. If I have to live like this, I don't really want to live at all."

Blaine's heart constricted in his chest as the mixed emotions began churning through his brain. This was not the boy who had terrorized his boyfriend into transferring schools, not the boy who had slammed him against a chain-link fence with a blend of malevolence and panic burning in his eyes – this boy was broken, beaten down. Was it karma that had come full circle, or could it be injustice? Was this really what a person like Karofsky deserved?

"No," he said, vocalizing the conclusion as easily as it came to him. "Karofsky, this isn't something you can cure. It's not a _disease."_

"While that sounds peachy and all, the rest of the world seems to think that it is," replied the larger boy, lowering his voice. "Why shouldn't I at least try?"

"Because you're trying the wrong solution," Blaine urged gently. "Just trust me on this, okay? I know. I played straight for _years_ because I thought that's what I was meant to be, but eventually… I came to the realization that the only thing I can be, and still keep my sanity intact, is _me_. You know? The _real_ me. Honestly, Dave, the sooner you figure that out, the better."

He wasn't sure when he'd placed his hand on Karofsky's, but he was squeezing it and for whatever reason, the other boy didn't pull away.

Blaine jumped when, suddenly, he felt a heavy hand fall to rest on his shoulder. Before he could react, Counselor Terry was speaking with deliberate seriousness into his ear. "No sexual or emotional contact will be tolerated here. Do you understand?"

A tremor of fear raced down his spine. "I – I'm sorry, I didn't mean –"

"You have committed a grave violation against camp policy. I believe we explained the rules to you in explicit detail upon arrival. Were you not paying attention? Or can you simply not manage to contain your carnal desires?"

His mouth felt dry as he answered, "No sir. I understand the rules just fine."

"Then you will understand that you are in need of correction." The man's voice felt like sickly sweet honey dripping down his neck. "You will meet me in the white house at eight p.m. sharp this evening. No exceptions."

He could feel Karofsky's eyes on him as his heart dove somewhere down into the pit of his stomach, causing the blood to run cold in his veins and every pigment of color to gradually drain from his face. "Yes sir," he heard himself respond.

"Good." Counselor Terry walked away, his boots playing a death march against the linoleum.

Karofsky was looking at him with a sympathy that was hardly enough to mask the fear in his eyes. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I shouldn't have let you…"

Blaine could do nothing but nod and rise shakily from his seat, taking his untouched tray with him on his way to the door. Tossed aside somewhere in the whirlwind of his thoughts was the instinct to breathe.

Blaine had seen the white house. It was an unassuming little shack lurking on the outskirts of the campground, aptly named for the whitewash paintjob on the outside walls in contrast with the bare wood of the surrounding cabins. What he'd heard about the house, however, was far more significant. He'd listened to his cabin mates muttering when they were alone about the unspeakable things that took place within the walls – Blaine had caught rumors of beatings and other cruel, humiliating punishments that made his skin crawl. _"One time," _he'd heard a boy say, _"they made me scream 'I'm a dirty faggot' for two hours straight. Couldn't talk for almost a day afterwards."_

The impending appointment weighed on his mind throughout that morning. He could think of nothing else as he was forced to sit through hours of group therapy sessions, sermons and degrading exercises. Finding refuge in a stuffy bathroom stall during afternoon break, he cradled his head in his hands and muttered the only word he longed to hear.

"Kurt."

* * *

Kurt was in a state of outrage. "The fact that you don't see the glaring irony of this situation slapping you across the face is astounding," he fumed. "They could be pelting him with fire and brimstone delusions as we speak, and yet you find it a logical solution to _pray_ for him?"

"Okay, we will not just let you stand there and compare us to those biased creeps!" Mercedes protested defensively. "Anyone who can treat our friend that way has no right calling themselves a Christian. That's not what God is about."

"We're all love, man," Joe added. "If they're stuck on hate, it's their problem."

"No, it's _my_ problem," Kurt retorted. "My boyfriend is stuck out in the middle of nowhere, enduring Gandhi knows what at the hands of some redneck preacher with a hetero-douchebag complex, and I can't do squat to help him!"

"Kurt, we get it," said Sam from his perch on the table. "You're upset. So are we, okay? We're just trying to help."

"Great," Kurt hissed. "Why don't you start by telling God to grant Blaine a pair of wings so he can flutter back home. Or, I don't know, maybe he can hitch a ride on Santa's sleigh!"

"Alright, enough already!" Quinn's expression was strained as she sent Kurt an exasperated look from across the table. "Snapping condescending remarks at us isn't going to change anything, and it certainly won't help Blaine, so just… go find somewhere else to be and let us have our meeting if you've got nothing better to do than nag in our faces."

Kurt grit his teeth, unable to bring himself to an apology. "Whatever. I'm going to try calling him again."

He paced in circles around the willow tree that shaded an overlooked corner of the school grounds, clutching his cellphone to his ear with the desperation of a drowning man, each monotonous ring that filtered through the receiver slowly fraying the nerve endings of his sanity. _"Congratulations,"_ piped a familiar voice that twisted Kurt's heart into knots,_ "you've reached the Blaine Anderson hotline. Leave a message."_

"Blaine," Kurt choked, blinking away the tears that sprang to his eyes. "Baby, please pick up. I… I need to know that you're okay. Please. I love you."

It was the seventeenth message he'd left in the past four days. Not one of them had been answered.

* * *

A slight tremor ran through his fingers as they curled around the brass doorknob, his fear-clouded brain trying desperately to spark up enough resolve to turn it. As he loitered on the two-step threshold of the small shack, staring at the peeling white paint long enough to notice its stark contrast with the dusk-veiled skeletons of trees in the forest beyond, his ears registered vague snippets of a muttered conversation being held by several boys standing at a distance. The way that their glances kept straying in his direction gave him the uneasy feeling that they were talking about him. Was it out of amusement, he wondered, or pity? Either way, it made his stomach squirm with something like shame, mingling nauseatingly with the trepidation that had already begun doing backflips in his ribcage.

_It'll be okay,_ he convinced himself, squaring back his shoulders with as much confidence as he could muster. It helped to imagine Kurt standing next to him, holding his hand. _You'll get through this. You'll be okay._

He opened the door before his mind could dissuade itself, his apprehension keening as he peered tentatively inside. A small foyer area as big as a broom closet welcomed him, two rickety chairs shoved against the wall on either side. Immediately beyond lay a dark hallway, lit only by a dim, yellowed florescent strip and running as far as a second door, the baby blue paint cracking with age. The hall was nearly as short and seemingly unnecessary as the chair space, but he had to summon up a whole new surge of courage just to force his feet to cross it, the splintering floorboards whining pitifully under his shoes. _It'll be okay,_ his subconscious repeated as he raised a hesitant fist, screwing his eyes shut and drawing a deep breath before planting a ginger knock on the door.

A pause. Then, a muffled, _"Come in."_

The wood creaked as Blaine swung it obediently aside, his eyes squinting themselves to adjustment in the even fainter light of the room beyond. Where he was expecting rusty chains and medieval torture devices, there was only a single, bare mattress standing against the wall and Counselor Terry taking up a straight-backed chair in the corner, arms folded expectantly across his chest. "You're late," he said.

Blaine ran a much-too-dry tongue over sandpaper lips, turning his gaze to the ground. "I was held up on kitchen duty, sir," he recited, having prepared the excuse upon exiting the bathroom stall where he had taken the time to ensure he wasn't going to vomit, before practically running across the campground to meet his imminent doom five minutes behind schedule.

"Hmm," the man grunted dubiously in response. Blaine could feel his cold, steady glare drilling holes through his skull. "Look at me when I address you, boy."

He reluctantly returned his eyes to meet Terry's, taking in the suburban standard haircut and sweat-slicked forehead lined with the beginning signs of age taking its toll. His expression read nothing but hatred and hardness – a look Blaine recognized crossing his father's face on far too often an occasion. However, unlike his father, he didn't know what to expect of this man or what he could be capable of. All he knew was that those eyes made his spine tingle with an unpleasant combination of discomfort and dread that made him want to turn around and leave the room, but his feet were rooted to the spot and there was nowhere he could run to in this camp to escape that feeling of being a disease that everyone around him wanted to stamp out. Now more than ever, he felt trapped.

"You understand, I assume, the reasoning for your punishment this evening?"

Blaine swallowed back the protests that fought to escape his lips, and instead settled on a nod and a rasped, "Yes, sir."

"Your actions were entirely inappropriate and completely contradicted the very fabric of this program," the man continued, leaning forward in his seat. "You have set an indecent example for every one of those boys who are struggling along this journey with you. Before we begin, I require a sincere apology and acknowledgement of your sinful behavior this morning."

"I'm sorry for holding Karofsky's hand. It was wrong." The words felt like sawdust in his mouth. "I won't do it again."

The legs of the chair creaked softly as Terry stood, approaching him with slow, deliberate steps. Blaine's heart picked up tempo, and he swore he could hear the blood swishing through his veins to his spinning head as the man leaned into his ear and whispered, "Take down the mattress."

* * *

The glistening droplets raced down a landscape of white tiles, one after the other, tracing their own tracks out of his line of sight. His eyes were fixated blankly on the space directly ahead of him – processing nothing, only seeing. The steady hammer of water on his skin numbed it to all feeling, drowned out all sound. Images and words wove their way like ghosts through his detached consciousness, and he fought them back with a blank wall of thoughtless oblivion, unable to bear it. The reliving of it.

"_Don't scream."_

It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. Blaine felt as if a metal bar were weighing down on his chest, compressing his lungs. He couldn't draw in enough oxygen to do anything other than stare at the tiles and let the faucet run over him, only vaguely aware of the severely low temperature of the water. The thought rose to the surface of his jumbled wreck of a mind that this must be what going into shock feels like.

_Unfamiliar skin, all around him, suffocating –_

"-aine? Blaine?"

Suddenly, hands on his shoulders, _touching_ him and trailing down, _down_…

"Blaine, it's me." A voice, echoing off the tiles and the insides of his head, unintelligible and barely heard. "It's me, it's Dave – uh, Karofsky. Remember?"

The moments ran together as the images assaulted him, memories of feelings and sounds embedded in his skin. The hands were there, hurting him, and_ it was happening again and he couldn't stop it, he couldn't get away –_

"Hey, hey, it's me. It's okay. It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."

A face swam in front of him, familiar eyes softened with concern and a spark of fear. As reality crept once again into the forefront of awareness, Blaine felt his own arms wrapped around himself, legs tucked beneath him, the freezing tiles pressing into his back. Karofsky knelt before him, water dripping down his jaw from a soaked crop of hair. At some point, he had turned off the shower, and they both sat shivering under the brisk bite of the bathroom fan.

"Blaine?" Karofsky tiptoed cautiously around the word; as if afraid the faintest sound would throw the smaller boy back into hysterics. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." It's not what he meant to say – not what he wanted to say – but it was the only thing he _could_ say for the sake of his sanity. "Fine."

Those open-book eyes would not leave his own downcast gaze alone to burrow into itself and hide, and Blaine wondered if he could _see_ it, see what that man had done to him, the unraveling mess those hands had made of him. If he did, Karofsky mercifully didn't acknowledge it; he simply held out a dry towel with an awkward, expectant noise in the back of his throat, and it was then that Blaine noticed he was naked and Karofsky was kneeling there, averting his eyes with tinted cheeks. "Here," he mumbled. "I-I won't look."

Blaine accepted the towel with mute gratitude (because he couldn't bear for him to look, couldn't let him see it), bracing his hand against the wall and summoning the strength to stand. His legs trembled unwillingly beneath him as a sharp, burning pain shot up his spine like an ice pick piercing his insides, and he had to catch himself from collapsing with a poorly-concealed hiss of pain. Karofsky's eyes flickered to him in concern before turning back to the moisture-speckled floor, a conflicted expression twitching at his lips.

Blaine secured the towel tightly around his waist and wrapped his arms around his chest, wanting nothing more than to curl into himself and disappear – but he couldn't do that now, couldn't break down again in front of Karofsky. After years of practicing carefully calculated technique to conceal his raging emotions and push them down to a place where no one would ever see his vulnerability, it was nearly impossible to break the habit and nothing short of painful when he let the façade slip. He couldn't allow himself such a mistake again.

"Can you walk?" Karofsky asked the question cautiously, both boys fully aware of the implications.

"Yes." Probably. He took an experimental step, wincing at the pang inside but pushing himself forward because _it was nothing, it didn't hurt so bad._ It was nothing.

Karofsky rose to his feet, shuffling and shifting as if he didn't know whether to reach out and help or just walk away. There was a pregnant pause, and Blaine could feel the other boy grasping for the words he couldn't hear. "Look, Blaine… Did –"

"I'm fine," he interjected, voice wavering despite himself. He didn't want this conversation. Not now. He couldn't handle this conversation.

"Blaine –"

"Please," he rasped, little more than a whisper escaping his lips. "Don't."

Not another word was said as he limped past a row of empty shower stalls to the door, ignoring the pile of clothes on the floor (because he never wanted to feel them against his skin again, knowing the stains that were there without even looking). When his hand reached the knob, he almost wanted to turn around and fall into the arms of the stranger behind him, let Karofsky hold him as he sobbed out every painful detail of the truth, screaming and crying and emptying his fractured soul onto the bathroom floor.

That was the moment when the cerebral wall returned to cage the emotions in, and he pushed the door open, staring blankly ahead as he stepped out into the nighttime air. He didn't want to feel; what he needed was to deny, to forget. He needed to be sitting on the Hudmels' couch, cuddling with the boy he loved in the middle of a forgetful romantic comedy, leaning into his boyfriend's touch because the images and sounds were buried down deep enough that they couldn't come back to haunt him. This was his desperate fantasy as he shuffled across the camp in the pitch blackness and stumbled into his cabin, slipping on a pair of pants and a T-shirt without thought, limbs following automatic commands. Lying on the cheap mattress of his temporary bed, memorizing the pattern of the bunk above him with unseeing eyes, he swallowed that night into the cobwebbed corner of his mind that sheltered his most unspeakable memories.

The Sadie Hawkins dance. His mother's tight-lipped expression of disappointment. His father's iceberg eyes, so much worse than a fist. Counselor Terry. Countless secrets, threaded through his ribcage and locked away in his heart-shaped box, never to see the light of day. He planned to keep them there; drag them to his grave, if he must.

It was just another secret.

* * *

**Not sure how thrilled I am with this one; it was probably a bit too short. I might continue it, but please don't hold your breath as that would probably turn out to be a suffocation hazard.**


End file.
